


Tell Me What You Want to Hear

by lady_ragnell



Series: Prompt Reposts [33]
Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Multi, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-06
Updated: 2016-10-06
Packaged: 2018-08-19 22:38:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8227130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/pseuds/lady_ragnell
Summary: Athelstan gets assigned to be the handler for two notorious secret agents. The arrangement lasts much longer than expected.





	

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:** plenty of implied violence and injury and gore, but none of it is "onscreen."
> 
> Reposted from a prompt I wrote a year or so ago. I just refuse to let those few first golden episodes of s1 go.
> 
> Title from "Secrets" by One Republic.

“Good luck with them,” Helga tells Athelstan on his first day.

All the handlers he's met have had a certain amount of exasperation in their tones, but he hasn't heard anything quite like this yet, and Athelstan pauses, filled with sudden trepidation, before he opens the door to the room where he's going to meet his agents. “Should I be prepared for something difficult?”

She pats his arm gently. “Sorry, it's kind of a rite of passage to be their handler for a few weeks. Don't worry if it doesn't work out. HQ is very aware how difficult they are. Now go in there, may as well make a good showing of it.”

That doesn't fill him with much comfort, but he takes a deep breath and opens the door. He knows Ragnar and Lagertha's pictures from their files. He's studied their techniques and fighting styles and expertises until he knows them by heart. He's still not prepared for their twin gazes on him the second he opens the door, and how their mouths curve into almost-identical smiles.

“Oh, hello,” says Lagertha Lothbrok, one of the two best agents the agency has ever seen. “We're going to have fun with you, aren't we?”

*

“Be honest with me. You're trying to get me to quit, aren't you?” Athelstan says in the adrenaline rush after their first mission together, leaning back in his chair and allowing himself the luxury of five seconds to brush the sweat away from his brow.

Ragnar just laughs over the comms. Athelstan isn't quite sure why he's laughing, considering he's estimating at least three cracked ribs and a flesh wound. “No such thing! You're the most entertaining handler we've had in ages.”

“Good to know I'm entertaining you,” Athelstan says, too tired to be sarcastic. “Is Lagertha conscious yet?”

“Oh, yes, we're just having a spot of fun while you find us an exit route.”

“A spot of—oh my God.” That just gets him the sound of both of them laughing over the comms. “I am going to find you that route out right now, please excuse me for a moment.”

“No need to be in a hurry, darling,” purrs Ragnar, and Athelstan mutes his headset so he can swear, heartfelt, before he starts finding them a way out.

*

“We brought you a present!”

“Tell me it's not a dead body,” says Athelstan, who has had the time over the past few missions to ask around about how they scared off previous handlers. He's lasted six weeks now, which he's told is longer than the last five people before him, and Ragnar and Lagertha seem improbably fond of him. He's still waiting for the other shoe to drop. “Or a priceless artifact I am going to have to return to its proper location.”

“Nonsense, both of those things would be very illegal,” Ragnar says, as though he has not done both of those things before, and produces a book from his pocket. It is, Athelstan notes with relief, just a nice edition of some poetry.

Ovid, in a very modern translation, he discovers within two seconds of opening the book, and he slams it shut again, blushing. “Well, thank you.”

“Not much for poetry?” says Lagertha, with a grin. “Don't worry, we'll get you figured out.”

*

Higher-ups have started looking twice at Athelstan in the halls, because it's been nearly three months and Lagertha and Ragnar haven't dismissed him yet, and even though they keep flirting and pushing every line he has, Athelstan can't bring himself to ask for a different assignment, either. They bring him books and trinkets from every mission, and treat him to dinner whenever they're in town.

“Is it possible they're playing some kind of long con?” Athelstan asks, helpless, when they've brought him some very delicious fruit that they really should not have been able to get through customs and then offered to feed it to him.

“I think,” Helga says with a bracing squeeze to his shoulder, “that they actually like you. You poor thing.”

*

A mission goes very wrong. It isn't Athelstan's fault, isn't anyone's fault, really, but there's an explosion and Ragnar saying “We're going dark” and then horrible, horrible silence. They don't check in after twenty-four hours. Or forty-eight. Or after a week. Athelstan rips through security footage everywhere they might be and finds nothing, and nobody dares mentioning them being captured or burned in front of him.

“Sweetie,” says Helga on the tenth day, too quiet, too kind, and Athelstan just shakes his head until she stops and gives him a hug.

*

Ragnar and Lagertha come stumbling into headquarters on the seventeenth day, both of them in terrible shape but both of them grinning, and Ragnar holding out a bag.

Athelstan ignores it and tries to hug both of them at once even though they're filthy and bloody. “Don't you ever do that to me again,” he says, hating the way his voice trembles, and both of them hold on right back. “Also, you've been dark for most of a month, debrief is going to be a nightmare.”

“Well, we would have been back two days ago, but we needed a nice enough present to make up for our absence,” says Lagertha when she pulls away, and presses the bag into his hands. “Open it later. Let's go talk to Haraldson and tell him his least favorite agents are home.”

*

It's a St. Jude medal on a thin gold chain, with a note in Lagertha's handwriting that reads “I hear he's the patron saint of lost causes.”

Athelstan has no idea what to do with that.

*

“Why haven't the two of you tried to get rid of me?” he asks when they're allowed out of medical and promptly take him out to dinner. “Helga told me on that first day that you always get rid of your handlers, that you like working alone better.”

“Because it turns out we finally found a handler who isn't so useless we'd rather work alone,” says Ragnar, with a shrug, but he's smiling.

Athelstan shakes his head. “I can't be that much better than everyone else.”

“Better doesn't matter,” says Lagertha, taking her husband's hand and looking pointedly at the medal glinting at his throat. “It just turns out you're a good fit. Why? Do you want us to cut you loose?”

He's shaking his head again before he even thinks of it, and then he swallows when they grin, because he feels suddenly as though he's sealed his fate and he's not at all sure that's a bad thing. “No. No, I think we can keep doing what we're doing.”

“Well, then,” says Ragnar. “I don't think the whys really matter, as long as we all agree on that.”


End file.
